Thursday, November 8, 2012

In less than one week, open source developers will gather in Antwerp, Belgium for an all day Hackergarten hosted by Devoxx and Andres Almiray. Contributors from projects such as Gradle, Fedora Java, Scala, Arquillian, CRaSH, Groovy, Drools, FluentLenium, Hibernate, Grails, Dart, JavaFX, and many, many more will be working on integrations, new features and patches.

Hackergarten is a great opportunity to work side by side on your favorite open source project with other contributors, learn new skills, and meet open source hackers.

By the way, did I mention the Hackergarten is free?

If you’re in or near Antwerp, please come by and join us! Introduce us to your open source project, discover the benefits of other projects, brainstorm some new features, and hack hard (it makes the beer taste so superb later that night).

Saturday, June 16, 2012

During the past year Arquillian has matured from a testing harness to a testing platform as it integrates with Selenium, Graphene, Spring, Android and more. In parallel, the Arquillian contributors have channeled their interlanguage and interframework development exploits into an ongoing tale of intergalactic bug extermination. Ike is gathering a crew as he expands into new frontiers. He’s using new tools to hunt for bugs and congifuring weapons with super strong materials to eliminate the bugs.

Crafting the look and feel of Ike, his crew, and their gear has this sci-fi fangirl constantly plotting ways to beam (forgive me, Scotty) the Arquillian platform artwork to the next dimension. However, the platform has diversified so rapidly that I can’t pull off diagrams, icons, and logos during all-night design binges hours before a presentation deadline. Nor does such a draw-and-dash design frenzy do the indvidual extensions, adaptors, and modules the creative and finely polished rendering justice they deserve.

I’m also a bit of a monster after thirty-six hours of no sleep.

Therefore, Arquillian now has a seperate repository where graphics can be conceptualized, drafted, and finalized over multiple iterations. It’s powered by community requests, community contributions, and community feedback.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been sketching logo ideas for Graphene and the Arquillian Spring Framework extension. I selected the sketches I think have potential and uploaded them for the feedback.

Graphene is designed to enhancement a Selenium project by focusing on rapid development and usability in the Java environment. Graphene takes its name from the semiconducting material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged into a 2D honeycomb lattice. Graphene is one of the strongest materials in existence.

I have to admit, I don’t feel that pencil sketches were great at coveying some of my ideas. Mainly because I realized I really suck at drawing hexagrams.

The next three concepts required lots of hexagrams, so I stopped torturing my eraser and fired up Inkscape.